Anti Virus Programs (and Firewalls)

[Frog]

This seems to creep in in other threads, so have at it here in its own!

I used to be sold on Zone Alarm and it's included Kaspesrky Anti Virus, but too many bad screw-ups with Windows security update compatibility made me change after a few years

Next up, was ESET's Nod 32, which I loved, and has a reputation for having one of the smallest footprints.

After anotherr two or three years, I made the mistake of reading a PC World test that rated the dreaded Norton the best at...
actually catching viruses before the machine did!
A real nanny though, and has a lot of baggage like not letting one use system restore and even sometimes not letting folks visit web pages that we know damn well are safe!
Interestingly, this situation may be exacerbated by the use of Firefox as my browser, but that is another thread today as well.

I understand that it is going to be tricky to completely eradicate Norton from my machine, but I plan on changing in the near future.

[ebscreen]

Oh man, Norton? I had the delightful task of removing that from my toad's computer a few
years back. The damn software hogged so much resources you could barely do anything
on the machine. May the force be with you.

[Frog]

Not a resource hog so much any more, but insidious with its tendrils reaching far and deep.

[squeezee]

Norton was always horrible, it must have got better because it couldn't get worse.  I use Avira and AVG.  Incidentally, if you have two PCs it isn't a bad idea to have different antivirus programmes on them, they may pick up different things.  I had Avira on one and AVG on the other, I got an obvious virus, AVG let it pass, Avira flagged it.

[prozyan]

I still use Zone Alarm, haven't had any major problems with it, except when I switched my PC from line based to wireless.